This blog post was co-written with Claire Pénicaud Scharwatt.
Today, we’re releasing the first publication in a series of deeper insights into selected topics based on the findings of MMU’s 2013 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Financial Services. This publication, ‘Reaching half of the market: Women and mobile money’ – addresses barriers that prevent women from accessing and using mobile money, and highlights some of the key tactics that mobile money providers can use to increase penetration amongst women.
With 246 services in 88 countries, mobile money has contributed to increase access to financial services to millions of previously unbanked and underbanked people around the world.[1] However, research shows that the industry might be overlooking a potential area of expansion – women, who constitute up to 50% of the potential customer base in every market.
Only 32% of the mobile money providers who took part to the 2013 MMU Global Adoption Survey reported being aware of the gender composition of their customer base and were actually able to report what percentage of their mobile money users were women. On the basis of this, the GSMA MMU and the Connected Women teams conducted semi-guided interviews with mobile money providers to understand:
- Whether it matters to measure the gender composition of mobile money customers;
- What are the barriers, if any, that make it harder for women to use mobile money, and
- What tactics have allowed successful mobile money providers to attract more women to their service.
Highlights from the paper:
Why gender data matters and why it should be tracked
The fact that only 32% of the survey respondents reported knowing the gender composition of their customer base, suggests that the mobile money industry is not collecting enough information about gender. Gender data is usually available, but it might be
- Not easily accessible – in many case, the gender information collected at the KYC is in paper form and will not be digitised;
- Not always reliable – interviews revealed that there is a tendency for men to register for the mobile money service on behalf of women, thereby making the gender information available to operators less reliable.
However, gender data, when reliable, can be used to boost mobile money performance, as it can be used to understand the usage patterns by men and women and develop strategies to increase uptake of the service and to measure the effectiveness of the tactics used to increase usage especially among women.
Increasing mobile money penetration amongst women
To tap into the female market, mobile money operators do not necessarily need to invent a brand new service: often times, tweaking the marketing and distribution approach of an existing service is enough to make it more appealing to women customers.
- Feature women in ATL campaigns – ensuring that women can relate to ATL campaigns is an important step to ensuring uptake of the service. This can be done by simply featuring female actresses and by ensuring that ATL campaigns are visible in locations frequented most often by women and/or at times when women are most likely to see them.
- Use roving agents – women are both time-poor and busy, especially in rural settings. Roving agents would allow them to perform transactions more often.
- Build a helpful and trusted agent network – Women tend to require more time to trust the service and to need more in-person interactions to be able to use the service, compared to men. For this reason, a patient, trusted and helpful agent network would ensure greater uptake of the service by women.
- Recruit good quality female agents – There was consensus amongst the interviewees that female agents tend to attract more female customers, especially in countries where culture makes it hard for women to interact with men.
- Include financial education in BTL activities – While including financial education in BTL activities is a powerful way to educating customers to use the service, it proves to be particularly effective for women, who need more in-person interactions to be comfortable with the service and have lower literacy levels than men.
We also encourage you to share with us any tactic that has proven effective to increase the penetration of a mobile money service in your market in the comments below or by emailing the authors, eminischetti@gsma.com and cpenicaud@gsma.com.
[1] Mobile Money Deployment Tracker, https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/connectivity-for-good/mobile-for-development/tracker/